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Best ever English football team revealed by statistics

28 May 2014

PUBS around the world echo with the debate&colon; Which is the best football team of all time? Statistics doesn’t have an answer yet – but it can crown the best team in the history of the English league.

Ian McHale and Rose Baker at the University of Salford, UK, created a statistical model of team strengths. They used this to analyse goal data from 200,000 matches in England and Wales that occurred between 1888, when the Football League was founded, and 2012. The games cover the top four English leagues, the FA Cup and the League Cup.

The model assessed teams using three measures&colon; attack ability divided by an opposite team’s defence, a team’s strongest average performance over a 10-year period and the probability of a team winning against the second-best team over a 10-year period.

By the first two measures, the Chelsea team of 2005/06 comes out on top, followed by the Manchester United team of 2007/08. The United team of 1992-2002 had the best odds of beating their next best rival (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society&colon; Series A, doi.org/swd).

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Sanjit Atwal, who runs football stats site Squawka, agrees with the result, but says the stats are just more fuel for the debate. “Fans will take whatever they can out of the data to win an argument,” he says.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Maths reveals the best football team”